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GENE SMITH’S SINK A Wide-Angle View
An incisive biography of the prolific photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith
Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photography’s most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come.
When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read “stroke,” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything,” from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep.
Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith’s stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smith’s Sink , Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smith’s life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smith’s Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer’s potent legacy and the subjects around him.
Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photography’s most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come.
When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read “stroke,” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything,” from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep.
Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith’s stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smith’s Sink , Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smith’s life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smith’s Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer’s potent legacy and the subjects around him.
224 pages, Paperback
Published August 14, 2018
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139 people want to read
About the author
Sam Stephenson
10 books8 followersSam Stephenson (born 1966) is a writer who grew up in Washington, North Carolina. He has been studying the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith since 1997.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 22, 2018
I can't say enough about this book. Aside from exploring the enigma of Gene Smith--Stephenson's work of the last two-plus decades--it sent me off in multiple listening and reading directions, taught me much about photography and obsession, and kept me locked in to what is essentially a detective story. The best book I've read in this brief year.
December 7, 2019
Anyone (and I mean anyone) who enjoys history is bound to prefer certain periods to others. While I'm a big fan of Middle Eastern and Turkish history around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman rebirth as the Republic of Turkey, Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View touched me in way that only an iconoclastic, non-conformist son of the United State could.
The book itself is easy to finish in a day or two and the material is remarkable. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Eugene Smith, he was one of the great photojournalists of his time. Critically wounded on the battlefield during World War II while working for Life magazine, the greatest forum in its day for photojournalism, Gene Smith lead a 'normal', affluent, upper middle class life until, unable to restrain his impulses, he quit Life, abandoned his family, and moved to a loft in the Flower District of New York.
Though neither the beginning or end of his career, The jazz loft was a crossroads of Beatnik/Bohemian New York life from 1957 to 1966. Everyone from Anais Nin and Norman Mailer to the corner junkie came to hang, and jazz players like Thelonius Monk, Rassan Rolland Kirk, Jerry Mulligan, and the brilliant but tragic Sonny Clark are illuminated in the documentary movie and this book because Eugene Smith recorded thousands of reels of magnetic tape with microphones wired all over his loft. Many of the tapes are purely ambient, which is fascinating in itself, but sometimes, as when Thelonius Monk and his arranger Hall Overton are preparing the masterful scores for the legendary Town Hall, it is the miracle of creation unfolding before us.
I first watched the documentary and then read the book, and though the same in places and certainly similar, they are not the same, which speaks to the recognition of the author and director in recognizing the different media they have been produced in. Eugene Smith was a bohemian product of his times; driven to edge (and sometimes over) of madness by his beautiful obsessions, which fueled his drug habits. But please don't consider this a spoiler because to experience his romantic drive for authenticity before Warhol made commercial art holy and cynicism became de rigueur is its own reward.
The book itself is easy to finish in a day or two and the material is remarkable. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Eugene Smith, he was one of the great photojournalists of his time. Critically wounded on the battlefield during World War II while working for Life magazine, the greatest forum in its day for photojournalism, Gene Smith lead a 'normal', affluent, upper middle class life until, unable to restrain his impulses, he quit Life, abandoned his family, and moved to a loft in the Flower District of New York.
Though neither the beginning or end of his career, The jazz loft was a crossroads of Beatnik/Bohemian New York life from 1957 to 1966. Everyone from Anais Nin and Norman Mailer to the corner junkie came to hang, and jazz players like Thelonius Monk, Rassan Rolland Kirk, Jerry Mulligan, and the brilliant but tragic Sonny Clark are illuminated in the documentary movie and this book because Eugene Smith recorded thousands of reels of magnetic tape with microphones wired all over his loft. Many of the tapes are purely ambient, which is fascinating in itself, but sometimes, as when Thelonius Monk and his arranger Hall Overton are preparing the masterful scores for the legendary Town Hall, it is the miracle of creation unfolding before us.
I first watched the documentary and then read the book, and though the same in places and certainly similar, they are not the same, which speaks to the recognition of the author and director in recognizing the different media they have been produced in. Eugene Smith was a bohemian product of his times; driven to edge (and sometimes over) of madness by his beautiful obsessions, which fueled his drug habits. But please don't consider this a spoiler because to experience his romantic drive for authenticity before Warhol made commercial art holy and cynicism became de rigueur is its own reward.
October 18, 2022
Read because it was mentioned in a recent Ross Gay essay. Didn’t disappoint!
May 18, 2018
I am willing to assert that no one now alive knows W. Eugene Smith more intimately than author Sam Stephenson. Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View is a 20-year labor of love; and it is not at all a conventional biography. It’s more of an appreciation or a psychoanalysis without foisting a writer’s interpretation on you. Stephenson listened to all 4,500 hours of tape recording that Smith made and then followed up on every person overheard on the tapes or who otherwise had any sort of relationship with Smith. What results is an incredibly nuanced portrait. You may draw your own conclusions.
If all you know of Smith is that his “Country Doctor” photographs were staged; or that his most famous image from “Spanish Village” was “photoshopped;” or that he was one massively troubled individual, then this wonderful monograph is going to shed light on Smith’s aesthetic motivations his muses and his demons. Stephenson quotes Tamas Janda, who knew Smith very well, with a most revealing comment: “Not many people are truly able to understand beauty and pain and ugliness. Most people don’t want to be reminded of their humanity, which is inherently painful and ugly. Gene sought that out.” (p. 97)
This is an interior portrait of a genius; and I left envious of this soul who could be so focused, so absolutely compulsive and dedicated to his craft and his quest.
If all you know of Smith is that his “Country Doctor” photographs were staged; or that his most famous image from “Spanish Village” was “photoshopped;” or that he was one massively troubled individual, then this wonderful monograph is going to shed light on Smith’s aesthetic motivations his muses and his demons. Stephenson quotes Tamas Janda, who knew Smith very well, with a most revealing comment: “Not many people are truly able to understand beauty and pain and ugliness. Most people don’t want to be reminded of their humanity, which is inherently painful and ugly. Gene sought that out.” (p. 97)
This is an interior portrait of a genius; and I left envious of this soul who could be so focused, so absolutely compulsive and dedicated to his craft and his quest.
June 25, 2019
I took a flyer on this book, based on its curious title. I had never heard of Gene Smith, but found that Smith was a prolific photographer and artist. He lived the stereotypical life of an artist, focused on the creation of art, at times oblivious of all else. The author approaches Smith like a private detective, tracking down acquaintances based on brief mentions in papers or on the audio tape that Smith liked to leave running and recording. You get a great taste of the life of an artist and his entourage in 50s Gotham. And a bonus here is that Smith lived among a number of jazz greats, and recorded them surreptitiously. So in addition to the life of a professional photographer/artist, you get a slice of life of a number of jazz artists. This really does a good job of putting you into the time and place. You can almost smell the reefer and feel oblivious about missing your rent payment.
October 1, 2017
The archive of a writer or an artist can be an incredibly rich, deep well of inspiration, especially when a truly open and inquisitive researcher digs in. Sam Stephenson is just such a person. He probably knows the enormous archive of photographer W. Eugene Smith (held at the Center for Creative Photography) better than anyone, having previously published three earlier books on Smith, who was best known as a great Life magazine photographer. Gene Smith's Sink is an example of what can happen when a researcher shifts focus from the main character to the sometimes ghostly figures on the periphery of an archive.
After Smith's son gave Gene Smith's darkroom sink to Stephenson, he had it converted into his writing desk. So the piece of darkroom equipment responsible for some of the most seminal images of twentieth-century photojournalism is now the source for some of the best documentary writing of the new century. In this book of some twenty-eight essays, Stephenson tracks down, visits with, or documents fascinating characters that he encountered while researching the life of Smith. He's relentless researcher who sometimes pursues the slimmest of clues to track people down across the United States and even farther, and when he finds his quarry he's a most attentive listener. Stephenson writing has a nice balance of personal observation, transcribed conversations, and use of original documents to make history and its participants come alive.
We need more books like this.
After Smith's son gave Gene Smith's darkroom sink to Stephenson, he had it converted into his writing desk. So the piece of darkroom equipment responsible for some of the most seminal images of twentieth-century photojournalism is now the source for some of the best documentary writing of the new century. In this book of some twenty-eight essays, Stephenson tracks down, visits with, or documents fascinating characters that he encountered while researching the life of Smith. He's relentless researcher who sometimes pursues the slimmest of clues to track people down across the United States and even farther, and when he finds his quarry he's a most attentive listener. Stephenson writing has a nice balance of personal observation, transcribed conversations, and use of original documents to make history and its participants come alive.
We need more books like this.
January 5, 2019
Sam Stephenson approaches Gene Smith as a topic by circling, writing about his milieu and the people around him. In this way, the most interesting things I learned through reading this book were the little portraits of jazz musicians who frequented his loft, and this may be what kept me reading. I say this because it was a slog: unstructured, with no narrative thread, and sloppy writing/editing. Stephenson constantly inserts himself into the narrative without really adding interest to the book. In one passage he admits he doesn't prepare questions for oral history interviews, which I felt was a damning admission. There isn't a single bibliographic reference in the book--did he research, beyond original interviews and reviewing tape? We don't know. The voices of the interviewees or taped subjects (many of the quotations come from tapes Smith made in his loft) appear to be unedited. I believe a good writer should make his subjects sound interesting--otherwise, why quote them? Certainly the book could have used a better edit. At only 202 pages, this book was difficult to finish. Not recommended except for diehards, I guess, and readers already familiar with Stephenson's approach.
September 20, 2017
The author, Sam Stephenson, has a meditation on the life of W. Eugene Smith as he visits the places that Smith has lived or visited. This book is not a biography but a series of episodes that illustrate the life of a world renown photographer of humanity. I especially enjoyed the thoughtful writing style and Stephenson's understanding of Smith. Stephenson has written two previous books on specific photographic essays that Smith produced so he is no novice to Smith's life.
This is obviously a labor of love by Stephenson for his subject as he tracks down the people that had touched the life and places that Smith inhabited. He writes of the great idiosyncratic jazz musicians that hung out at Smith's loft in New York City as well as the people and places who were photographed in his essays like "Minamata" or "Nurse Midwife".
Highly recommended for those who would try to understand what were the wellsprings of Smith's life and work.
This is obviously a labor of love by Stephenson for his subject as he tracks down the people that had touched the life and places that Smith inhabited. He writes of the great idiosyncratic jazz musicians that hung out at Smith's loft in New York City as well as the people and places who were photographed in his essays like "Minamata" or "Nurse Midwife".
Highly recommended for those who would try to understand what were the wellsprings of Smith's life and work.
April 18, 2022
This was probably not the ideal choice for my first book on the subject of photographer Gene Smith. The author is an expert on the artist and has produced previous volumes about Smith so I’m guessing ‘Sink’ serves more like ancillary reading to the author’s other works. That being said, I found this a rather interesting read on the people, or the people who knew people, who knew Smith. Here and there it felt like we were going down garden paths that got a bit farther from the portrait of the artist tan I would have liked, but most of those digressions were pretty short. There was a subversive beat sensibility to this book which I appreciated. It was also helpful that I read it in conjunction with some documentary films about Smith I saw on Youtube.
March 10, 2019
W. Eugene Smith Paid Dearly To Be The Best
I'm so glad Sam took the time, and foresight, to include so many outside forces and elements of the times in which Eugene lived. It was instrumental in my attempt to get the smallest of an understanding of the great photographer W. Eugene Smith as a passionate man, in more ways than one.
A highly recommended read for all photographers who are interested in the life of W. Eugene Smith, as well as, gaining an insight into how your environment can drive your passion and shape your photography. Gene paid a very high price to be the best at his craft.
I'm so glad Sam took the time, and foresight, to include so many outside forces and elements of the times in which Eugene lived. It was instrumental in my attempt to get the smallest of an understanding of the great photographer W. Eugene Smith as a passionate man, in more ways than one.
A highly recommended read for all photographers who are interested in the life of W. Eugene Smith, as well as, gaining an insight into how your environment can drive your passion and shape your photography. Gene paid a very high price to be the best at his craft.
August 30, 2017
Having spent some time with Sam Stephenson's book The Jazz Loft Project, this book serves as a great companion to that book and offers a look behind the curtain, or the lens, at the life and process and relationships of Gene Smith. As a fairly obsessive person myself, I have great appreciation for the obsessive lengths Stephenson went to in order to get to the deepest possible level of who Smith was.
May 28, 2018
While the writing was good and the first few chapters were promising, the book went on long tangents about people that weren't really relevant to the life of Eugene W Smith. It's a short book, and there isn't much information on how he embarked on his projects, his ideas and his creativity, stuff that people interested in him would want to read.
August 2, 2022
Very difficult read as I knew nothing about Smith. The book is only for mega fans of his work and his life. I did a wiki search and was intrigued. I am getting a book from the library to see his work ( this book had none). It is a flight of fancy for the author and I will say the people he found information about were very vivid but in the end, I really didn’t care.
January 20, 2019
Great for jazz nerds and general obsessive types. Not much about photography, mind.
February 23, 2021
2 of my favorite things are photography and jazz so I was drawn to this book. The book tries to understand Smith by understanding the people who were closely associated with him, thus the title.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews